naked capitalism

Your humble blogger is taking a vacation, in large measure due to the success of the fundraiser last year (that was one of the mini-targets we set and you met).

Matt Stoller and Lambert will be running the site while I am away (on an austerity tour, starting in Barcelona, coastal Spain, Portugal, and France). I am leaving tonight (and am hopelessly behind, so if you get more posts, consider yourself lucky). Back June 4.

Be nice to the site DJs and enjoy the change in programming! I know they have some good posts lined up.

Live stream, hat tip reader Deontos:

A related Twitter feed here:

https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23occupyoakland

NC may be launching a research project on foreclosures in late January. We hope that some members of the NC community will be willing to lend a hand. As long-standing readers of this blog may know, we assembled a small team to assist us on ECONNED, and we got many responses from very qualified people and assembled a high caliber and very useful group.

We are looking for 2-4 people who could hopefully give us at least ten hours a week. This project would require what at McKinsey was called data gathering, as well as analysis. Some of it would involve organizing and bird-dogging an effort to obtain court records. Another important part would be to help build out a large spreadsheet. All team members would participate in the analysis of data and the formalization of findings.

The time frame is late January through mid May, with some possible minor follow on activity into June. Ideal candidates would be graduate students, either law school or a discipline that involves data development and analysis.

Please contact me at yves@nakedcapitalism.com if you are interested. Thanks!

Actually, this blog was six old yesterday too, but we didn’t get around to telling you then.

I know many of you are getting Christmas cards with inserts extolling company, or worse, family accomplishments. So I’ll keep it brief. After 8,582 posts, according to Google Analytics, we have close to 2 million page views and 300,000 unique visitors a month (the latter is clearly overstated, since someone accessing the site and home and at the office would be counted as two visitors). But most important, we have an discerning, engaged readership, and we hope our work has shed a bit of light on the dark corners of the financial services industry. As we wrote on our first birthday:

Although we take interest in the traffic, what is most important to us is that we are attracting a high caliber readership and getting the attention of people who have influence. Perhaps it’s naive, but we think our mission is to encourage people to think more critically; finance just happens to be a convenient place for us to operate. One of our favorite mottos is the Will Rogers saying, “It isn’t what you don’t know that will hurt you, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”

There are so many people who have contributed in so many ways to the success of this website that it is hard to know where to begin. Our guest bloggers. The individuals who send us links suggestions. The commentariat. People who have put us on to important stories. Fellow bloggers, some of whom correspond, others who chew over what we have said on their sites. The members of the community who supported us in our recent fundraiser. But ultimately it is the readers that make an initiative like this possible, and I am as always grateful for your interest and participation.

Reader Alex Karpowitsch has suggested a Naked Capitalism holiday gathering, meaning drinks, near Zuccotti Park this Friday, December 9, at 7:00 PM. I’ve been slow to take him up on his idea because I needed to sort out my calendar.

Details on Plancast. Hope to see you there!

I’m a bit stymied in my desire to get moving on a site redesign. It is not the dearth of reader input in the comments section (you’ve been generous on that front) so much as quite a bit of the input is one-offish in nature. There are some feature changes that are clearly needed, such as having adding an edit or preview function to comments and having a proper contact page (although I perversely find it useful to force readers to work a tad to find my e-mail address; I’m swamped as it is, and lowering the barrier to e-mailing me will likely result in an even more overloaded inbox, with the side effect of even more messages from people I consider to be pretty high priority getting missed). The “Contributors” section in the right column probably gets moved to a click-through button in a bar across the top.

The first thing is to figure out feature changes. It may turn out that we stick with ones that are obvious (an elaborated version of the list above) plus ones that will help site performance.

Cody Williams has volunteered a couple of times in comments to give substantial input on a site redesign, and I’ve been super remiss in not following up. I wonder if another reader or two who also has some experience or a strong point of view in this area is game to join in a round robin (for instance, Psychoanalytus has a user interface programming background and has a strong point of view as well…). There are probably elements of Sven Franck design that are worth incorporating (I liked his “Explore” button, but it may be more straightforward to have the more conventional bar across the top. We have that now with the “[ Subscribe | Blogroll | Topics | Archives | Videos | Contributors | Site Statistics | Search ]” above the banner ad, but it is easy to overlook that. I’m also not sure re how much redundancy to have, since some of the things now across the top are replicated in the right column).

That is a long-winded way of saying I’ve gotten some non-converging reader advice, and having a small group help me sort it out would be very much appreciated. Ping me if you are game.

Another query is I need a teeny bit of graphic arts work done (changing text in an existing design + a new small design task). Need quick turnaround, will pay.

Thanks a ton!

We are on our new servers! There may be some issues with the caching which might make comments or other features temporarily a bit funky, but that should settle out quickly. You will hopefully see a modest, or maybe better than modest, improvement in loading speed.

We are also in the process of seeing how to get some breaks now and again like normal people. I had described getting ECONNED written while blogging as a Bataan death march, and the pace has not let up much since then (the world was kind enough to be in a phony recovery in the summer of 2009, which meant I did not miss too much by being less on the grid while writing the book).

I am in the process of seeing if I can set up weekend coverage for 2 weekends a month (that means 2 posts, which can include cross/guest posts and videos) plus Links. That would enable me to get a break and deal with the rest of my life. Lambert Strether is going to cover two days (Sunday and Monday AM) this weekend, so be nice to him! He’s very much on top of what is happening with the various Occupations, so he should be giving some valuable coverage.

Thanks again for your support of and interest in Naked Capitalism!

Just to let you know I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to start moving on site improvements, reader Sven has developed draft versions of a mobile website. These still need some refining, but I wanted to give you a look-see and the opportunity to comment.

YOU NEED TO LOAD THEM ON A MOBILE DEVICE. Loading them on your desktop might be entertaining, but we want comments from people using it in the intended manner.

Version 1

Version 2

Note only the first page of each works, and the links go back to the site. (Personally, I’d like to see the turquoise on the desktop version incorporated here but colors are the easiest design issue we have to contend with)

Sven did intend his design to be cross platform, and I think it looks nice on my Mac, but my ad service protested. First, they said mobile designs are all about speed and maximizing the viewing space. They highlighted this post as the sort of designs that they thought made sense for mobile devices.

So even though he cleaned up the right column and created the clever “Explore” button, what is now on the right probably gets relegated to a combo of a bar across the top with links in it and the Explore button.

Second, they are really really over the moon keen about a service called Onswipe for iPads. The problem from my perspective is that Onswipe is designed to run as a native application, and they’ve rethought all the design parameters. That means they are super visual (which does not do a text heavy site like mine any favors) and they don’t serve pages in the blog reverse chronological order. MSM sites seem to like it (remember, they are more visual to begin with) but they have also done heavy customization (iPad users no doubt notice the difference, say, in the NY Times app on their computer v. their iPad).The ad folks love it because iPad users swipe though pages quickly, so they get 3X the page views on the iPad that they do on a desktop (I wonder how long it will take advertisers to figure out some of these swipes are so fast as to be junk views). It is a non-starter now as far as I am concerned, because they don’t incorporate comments sections (!). They promise to have it in the next few months.

These are the standard templates and I hate them. You can see how they presuppose a picture-dominated design. They say they will help customize them but I am pretty leery:

Onswipe Private Layouts

What concerns me more fundamentally is that this medium seems to be hostile to what this site is about, which often is deep digging into complex topics. This note from someone at my ad service confirmed that:

I don’t think you are truly accepting the concept of making a site Tablet friendly. Text heavy is bad for a 10 inch screen. I have visited your site on an iPad and it is a long process to try and read more than the articles on the home page. In order for someone to be easily able to navigate all of your content you need to have a system that puts it all at their fingertips. That is what Onswipe as well as probably 5 other startups are doing right now and getting millions of dollars in venture capital to do so. Every major news publication is creating custom applications and HTML5 versions of their newspapers because a regular site does not work at all for mobile.

I got a message from a tech savvy, sympathetic reader that I found depressing:

I think you’re missing a conceptual frame about mobile. It’s very important to recognize that ipad’s and smartphones are just different than pc’s.

When I started blogging in 2002, a lot of people made the mistake of assuming that blogs and television were the same, because both had screens. I’m not kidding. It took the form of “anyone can say anything without editors unlike TV”. This complaint actually revealed how little these people understood about blogs and media in general. They didn’t get the ability to correct and update posts, but they also didn’t understand two things about social media. One, fundamentally blogs are not a limited bandwidth medium, and two, blogs have a social filter. You can start a new blog in five minutes, you can’t start a new Sunday show without enormous capital and social connections. You also can criticize a blog post using a relatively equalized platform (comments or another blog), you can scream at your TV if you disagree with what’s on, but that’s about it.

This was both a social and a technological difference. It’s not just that the web and TV are technically different. Social group editing for blogs was different in form and hierarchy than TV producing. These kinds of differences are common whenever there’s a leap in format. The first movies were filmed plays, Yahoo was essentially a phone directory, the first web in the 1990s didn’t have blogs b/c people were porting newspapers to the web directly. Eventually a native format for the medium emerges.

This is what iPads represent, a different medium. In terms of its technology, the use of hands and swiping changes how people interact with the content. Richer, more visual content is easier to look into, including audio, video, video games, books, and interactive content. It’s the CD-ROM fantasy the media fanboys thought would emerge in the mid-1990s. For NC, this probably means associating pictures with your content, as you do with your link posts. Socially, the mobile system is actually more oriented towards services like twitter and facebook than comments, and frankly, it’s more like television (sadly) in the power it is pushing back to the publisher. This isn’t to say you should think about getting rid of the comment section, because you obviously have to combine your mobile and PC workflow if nothing else.

This is just a conceptual frame for you, and it might explain the Onswipe template. I have some issues with the Onswipe visuals, mostly they don’t fit within your established workflow of reverse chronological posting and they get rid of the community. Those problems can be solved either through modification of your workflow, or giving them a clear visual hierarchy, like segmenting your posts and your guest-posts into sections or finding a way to highlight important stories or something like that on the mobile site.

You can see why I avoid dealing with site administration and act like the cobbler whose children go unshod. I wonder if the proliferation of mobile devices will be the end of blogging and more important, of the ability of blogs to affect the collective discourse, and the answer may be yes.

We have less than two hours to go with our fundraiser. We were at 1104 donors officially tallied as of 11 PM EST. The donations I can track from my end spiked in the last two hours, with 44 more of you chipping in. James B, who is processing non-PayPal credit card donations, is behind (!) and estimates he has 25 more than he told me about as of his last update (6:30 PM). So we are somewhere between 1170 and 1175 donors, within striking distance of our final goal of 1200 donors.

I’m thrilled at the response. As much as I enjoy all the donations and the kind notes some of you have sent (either via e-mail or on the blog), I also get gratification when people I know personally chip in. Some of them have provided generous support before, such as Steve Waldman, who was enormously helpful on Chapter 2 of ECONNED (although I must confess the fact that he could write SUCH long critiques of what I wrote was a bit disheartening at the time), Scott Saunders (who did our book trailer and now looks pretty prescient). Other donors I recognize include Tanya Harned (we spent the better part of the month, “we” including Tom Adams, Andrew Dittmer, and former codebreaker Thomas Ross) tearing apart AIG statutory financials and our hair (we concluded there might be a pony but it would take more manpower than we had), Kathleen Cully (former general counsel of a monoline; we’ve disagreed on the New York trust theory as regards mortgage securitizations, so it is particularly sporting for her to contribute), Michael Hirsh of the National Journal, and Michael Thomas (of the one time New York Observer Midas Watch column).

So, last chance. Be one of the 27 or so we need to push this effort over the top. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar, another credit card portal or by check (see here for details). Yes, PayPal and Chrome do NOT get along right now (a techie reader sent a fix, but that won’t be implemented tonight). If you use Chrome, try another browser for the Tip Jar, or use the portal, or send a check (be sure to send us a message, “Check is in the mail” so we can count your donation in the fundraiser total).

If you can give a little, give a little. If you can give more, give more. If you can give a lot, give a lot. You are investing in being part of the solution.

Less than four hours remain in the Naked Capitalism fundraiser. Show your support of critical thinking, merciless evisceration of lame punditry, deep diving into turbid financial waters, and cute animal pictures. As our guest blogger, Michael Hudson, has said:

Naked Capitalism has quickly become my favorite and most informative site to see where the bodies are buried. Yves focuses on the all-important technical details that are beyond the competence of most sites to grasp, let alone walk the reader through the maze.

Join us and participate via our Tip Jar, another credit card portal or by check (see here for details). Yes, PayPal and Chrome do NOT get along right now (a techie reader sent a fix, but that won’t be implemented tonight). If you use Chrome, try another browser for the Tip Jar, or use the portal, or send a check (be sure to send us a message, “Check is in the mail” so we can count your donation in the fundraiser total).

We’ve raised our target for the number of donations to 1200 and we are now at 1104 as of 11 PM EST. Our rate of donations was higher in the last two hours than the two before that. That total does not include the last five hours on the check portal, so the total is certain to be higher.

With our deadline of midnight PST (3:00 AM) we’ll just squeak if those of you who haven’t had time yet chip in, and those who’ve given earlier make an additional donation on behalf of those that are suffering financial hardships. If you can give a little, give a little. If you can give more, give more. If you can give a lot, give a lot. You are investing in making a difference.

Thanks so much for your generous contribution to our fundraiser. We’ve raised our target for the number of donations to 1200 and we are now at 1080 as of 9 PM EST. With our deadline of midnight PST (3:00 AM) we’ll just squeak if those of you who haven’t had time yet chip in, and those who’ve given earlier make an additional donation on behalf of those that are suffering financial hardships.

Join us and participate via our Tip Jar, another credit card portal or by check (see here for details). Yes, PayPal and Chrome do NOT get along, so if you use Chrome, try another browser for the Tip Jar, or use the portal, or send a check (be sure to send us a message, “Check is in the mail” so we can count your donation in the fundraiser total).

This effort has been very gratifying in demonstrating that many of you really do value having an alternative to the mainstream media that provides hard-hitting commentary. Moe Tkacik, who often writes about finance (venues include Reuters, the New York Observer, and Daily Finance), wrote us:

I just want to make the point that old-school journalism doesn’t work anymore, even when it’s done the right way; even when it should. Long, thorough, painstakingly researched features do not have the impact they should because you need to have the energy for information warfare, and most journalists are honestly just bummed by that process.

It has to do with that three-part Detroit Free Press investigation into Fannie/Freddie’s fire sales. If you read it, it was shocking. Reporter spent 8 months piecing it together. It shows in very vivid detail how economically irrational Fannie/Freddie’s scorched earth foreclose-at-all-costs has been. I’d seen a lot of evidence of this in the NC comments section, but the story really did an admirable job laying it all out. They analyzed thousands of transactions.

Reporter told me she spent a week compiling questions for the FHFA. And they just refused flat out to comment at all.

8 months of investigation, the daily newspaper in a very hard-hit city, and they JUST DON’T FUCKING COMMENT. Because her questions suggested she had an “agenda.” Ed DeMarco sent a stupid letter to the editor denying everything without denying anything.

There is something so hysterically off here. This is not how things were when I got into the business. The government had a basic respect for investigative journalists. This kind of story would have an impact. Instead they didn’t even bother COMMENTING.

Anyway, story gets no traction. None. Partially bc reporter is completely unskilled in the self promotion component of this industry, and she went on vacation right after it ran, but seriously.

When I wrote about the FHFA, it was such a complicated story that it became a two-parter. I realized there were so many layers of spin suffocating those two enterprises that it seemed very plausible that there was no actual grand moneymaking scheme driving the whole thing, that it was just a byzantine bureaucracy staffed by people solely focused on covering their asses.

After the first part went up, my editor got an angry call from the FHFA. She couldn’t *believe* Reuters would actually post a second part. He asked what factual assertions she took issue with. She could not name a single one!

I call her back to follow-up and her message has two parts, one for the media and one for homeowners trying to refinance. That’s how highly these people value the public they ostensibly serve; one fucking flack is supposed to handle calls from both journalists and millions of homeowners. (The OIG had actually investigated this and concluded that the FHFA really needed to stop treating consumer complaints as a media relations function, but apparently they haven’t found time to fix the problem.)

Anyway, NC is pretty much my last hope for anything at all.

Hopefully we really aren’t the last hope, but Moe’s comments tell us how hard it is for even dedicated journalists not to be ground down by the way the powers that be refuse to play ball with the Fourth Estate. That makes independent sources of expertise even more important, and this community’s collective knowledge and skepticism is an important resource in the effort to challenge corruption among the elites and diseased orthodoxies.

The Naked Capitalism community has spoken loudly and clearly. You’ve said you want this site to be more effective and you’ve been willing to provide tangible backing for your desire to have us demystify finance, call out chicanery in high places, parse propaganda, and in our small way, help promote the creation of a more just society.

We set an initial target of 750 donors. You met that yesterday. We set a new target of 1000. You blew past that today. We are now at 1060 donors. Let’s see if we can get to 1200 before the close of this effort, midnight PST. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar, another credit card portal or by check (see here for details).

We’ve gotten SO many messages that it will take me some time to dig through them. I wanted to share this one:

I regret I haven’t more to give, but I’ve recently lost my job and haven’t yet started receiving unemployment. I will be sending a check for $20 tomorrow, Saturday November 12th.

Thanks for all you do to bring Naked Capitalism together. I plug it a lot and I have certainly become better educated about finance.

I told him not to send anything until he was at least on unemployment. He agreed on the condition I include him in the total.

Those of you who are under financial stress, please take care of yourselves first. Others will make up for you. But if you give, even a little, please do. If you can give more, give more. If you can give a lot, give a lot. Those of you who donated early, I thank you, and if you are able, consider chipping in another $10, $15, $25 on behalf of those in the NC readership who are cash strained but value their participation in the community. We only have a few hours left and on behalf of all of you who contribute, by guest blogging, financially, in comments, by providing links, or the occasional tech advice and prodding, I’d like us to make this effort as big a success as possible.

I’ve always been a big believer in the comments section, because you correct me, give ideas and information, and make my work and that of the other bloggers better. What’s happened this week took that up a level. It’s always a bit lonely to throw out ideas into the void, to see if they resonate with others. Over the past few years, and especially over the past week, you have showed me that we are actually a community, a group of people who believe together in justice. Individually, you decided to put your resources on the line to make sure that we keep going, grow, and get better, that our words and ideas matter. This is essential, it’s the first part of creating a different society, where we assert our own collective dignity.

Let’s get to 1000 donors. Right now we’re at 940, that means all we need is 60 of you to join us (click on the Tip Jar buttons to do so over Paypal, here if you’d like to use a credit card portal, and here for instructions on how to do so with a check).

Over the next year, I’m excited to work with all of you to continue to puncture the perceived monopoly of wisdom the Very Serious People have over finance. It’s ultimately a community endeavor to do this because ideas cannot be divorced from the networks of people who carry them. It’s really remarkable that we are actually a community, as well as a website, and I’m going to be thinking hard about how to make sure we manifest that going forward.

For now, there are twelve hours left of the Naked Capitalism fundraiser. That’s it. It’s our first fundraiser. If you’ve already given, thanks for sending me the message that this site matters, that we can create leverage in the world from our own corner. If you haven’t, there’s still time (though not that much of it). I guarantee you that in a few years, you will be proud of being a part of building this community. You will have shown that there are parts of this world that believe that integrity, and dignity, matter.

That’s what you’ve shown me.

Thanks to the many readers who have so generously responded to our appeal, we’ve beaten our target of 750 donors and are now at just over 825. Since we had over 200 of you contribute yesterday, we’d like to see if we can reach the new target of 1000 by midnight PST.

So far, your investments have paid for improvements we’ll be acting on in the upcoming months: upgrades to site speed and service, a travel budget, meaningful “thank yous” to the regular guest bloggers, vacation support to keep the site vibrant while I get some R&R, a grab bag of smaller site enhancements, like a mobile version of the site and audio equipment for podcasts, and using more support staff for specific tasks so I can spend less time on administration and more on site content. We have already given the go-ahead for a server upgrade, and one reader is trying to find a way to make compressing the antidote du jour photos easy for me to do every day (this will also evidently improves site performance a lot). One reader has a draft version of a mobile site I hope to be able to show you later today (he’s tweaking some recalcitrant bits).

The goal here is to build a culture where we pay for truth, instead of being lied to for free. Guest posters Matt Stoller and Mark Ames have described why we are engaged in this effort: because elite financiers have sought to create an information monopoly in the media and inside the Beltway, and Naked Capitalism has become one of a small number of sites that cuts through their propaganda. Even Congressman Brad Miller chimed in on Facebook.

Here’s what some of you have to say:

Naked Capitalism is one of the best financial information websites of our time and I really, really like the on line format (especially the animal pictures). I do not know how you find the time to research, write and publish your website and still manage to perform your video interviews.

Although I am just a lay person, I am one of those who check in with your site first thing in the morning…The sparkling analysis gets me going.

Kudos to you for a terrific website.

We’ve also had MANY offers of help. I’ll be replying (and hopefully churning out thank you notes) over the next few weeks. I particularly liked this one:

I am a master gardener based in London who has been an avid reader of your blog since the week-end of the 12th/13th October 2008 when all that slight unpleasantness with the financial sector came to light, so to speak.

I am a great believer in continuing to learn throughout life and have made it my business to attempt to understand WTF went on. In this you have been an irreplaceable resource.

I am not a particularly wealthy man and, (you may find this strange), own neither a debit card nor a credit card. However I am widely regarded as one of the foremost English gardeners in private practice in London. I am also the gardening expert and consultant for BBC London radio where you can hear me on a fortnightly basis from February through to November.

Apart from my private practice in London I have designed and consulted in North Carolina, California, Maryland (from where I am writing this email), France, Spain, England, Scotland and Wales.

I know that you are something of a gardener yourself and therefore I wish to offer my services on a pro bono basis to you or anybody else who has supported your invaluable work. If there is any way that you lot can benefit from my acquired knowledge – it is at your disposal. By email if by no other means.

I will next be on the East Coast next spring and very probably in California at some point next year.

I have garden landscapers, tree surgeons, fruit and vegetable experts and plant experts, (all who have trained under me) who may also be able to help.

I have, at times, despaired of your country over the last few years; however reading you and your blog has done more than anything else to restore my faith in the great republic that I feared had been lost to me.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is an old family friend and I am sure will vouch* for the genuine nature of this offer.

I am also considered a very entertaining performance poet and will happily take part in any fund-raising gig that is doable.

*This does not imply that I share any of his positions ideologically speaking!

Sadly, I have no garden. I suggested a mini charity auction: a certain amount of your time for anyplace in a certain geographical range. He is game! The reply:

Great idea! – very amenable within the constraints of travel – raising money for your organization would be a priority in my calendar

A small confidence-building consultation up to full monty project management could be considered as items to be bid for

Timing (seasonal) is everything – I have a week spare in December – Jan, Feb good(ish) – my Spring is not yet fully blocked out

If some readers have gardens they’d like brought to the next level (or have friends who might be interested), please chime up in comments.

I’m deeply grateful for how many of you have contributed in the various ways you can. And this is the last chance for this 2011 fundraiser. So donate now to Naked Capitalism. If you can’t afford much, give what you can. If you can afford more, give more. If you can give a lot, give a lot. This isn’t just giving, it’s a statement that you are want a different debate, a different society, and a different culture. It’s time to join us as we make sure this site can do an even better job of debunking the lies that prop up a diseased power structure and promoting a more just social order.

So far, we’ve had over 620 of you chip in for our fundraiser, and are well on our way to reaching our goal of 750 donations. So far, these contributors have paid for upgrades to site speed and service, a travel budget, meaningful “thank yous” to the regular guest bloggers, vacation support to keep the site vibrant while I get some R&R, and a grab bag of smaller site enhancements, like a mobile version of the site and audio equipment for podcasts. Thanks to your speedy response, we’ve given our tech support the go ahead to get moving on the site upgrade, and we’ll be showing you a possible site design for your input in the next few days. OUr final target is $11,000 for various “buying my time back” types of support, so I can spend more time on things that help provide more information and posts to the community, such as some limited but regular secretarial support and ongoing assistance with Links and research. While volunteers can also be tremendously valuable, having things happen on a regular, routinized basis usually requires a financial outlay. We already have $1,800 toward this goal as of the start of this day.

The goal here is to build a culture where we pay for truth, instead of being lied to for free. Guest posters Bill Black and Philip Pilkington have described why we are engaged in this effort: because ignorance had a high price and in the wake of the crisis, confusion and the dead grip of failed ideology make it hard to discern the outlines of a power structure in crisis. Even Congressman Brad Miller chimed in on Facebook:

This is a fundraising appeal for the blog Naked Capitalism, but Matt Stoller’s description of the control of information about financial issues by the industry is dead on. James Kwak, also a blogger, calls it “cognitive capture”: don’t you want to be one of us sophisticated, serious people, instead of part of the populist rabble?

Here’s what some of you have to say:

After I read your book, I then started reading your blog, and now it’s the first thing I check every day. I even put the juciest stories on my Facebook for my friends to see.

NC is my go-place on the web

I really like your perspective on and critique of economics and the complacent, self-serving puffery of much of modern economics.

Although I must keep my lantern lighted in search of an honest man, I have at last found another honest woman. If I were not happily married, I would propose to you on the spot. Keep up the incredible good work!

I’m overwhelmed by your generosity. There are just two days left, so it’s time to join us as we make sure this site can do an even better job of promoting critical thinking and presenting the unvarnished truth.